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Kiu... you are a little unclear to Jon.

ALL Nikon "M" cameras have an "M" before the serial number (e.g. M609XXXX). However many Japanese collectors consider any camera with a factory flash Sync to be called an "S," even though the camera's serial number starts with an "M." In many ways they are right, Nikon never used the term "M" to describe their cameras, they were simply called the "Nikon," or the "S" in literature and ads. Nikon did not use the term Nikon I. These are mostly collector terms, to help describe what we own. The Nikon factory did however consider the M, without flash, to be a separate model from the S, but not in literature they published, they just kind of fade quietly into the "S."

This description has changed somewhat, maybe because so much Nikon history has been written in English. We here in the US (and Europe) call an "M" camera with flash a "synced-M" and the others "un-synced M," to differentiate them all from the regular S cameras. Calling a camera with an "M" in the serial number an "S" seems confusing to me.

All this confusion exists because Nikon numbered more M top plates than they ended up needing, and so there was an overlap. The "M" was added to the serial numbers on plates originally created for the original Nikon (the Model I as collectors call it). Nikon could not afford to discard top plates, so they used what they had in stock.